What’s
happened here then? I don’t know, but I’ll give you
my hypothesis, based purely on this photograph.

When the flats
were built the council shied away from installing a proper communal
TV system because they’d been ripped off plenty of times
before. Instead they had some special wall brackets made and had
masts fixed above each group of six flats. They then told the
tenants that they could fix their own aerials onto the masts.
This meant that they had in effect created a TV distribution system
with no earth bonding, but no matter. As time went on the tenants
added more and more aerials, because they were naturally unwilling
to adhere to the council’s stereotypical view that people
in small council flats have only one TV set.

Eventually the mast
snapped. The firm sent out to effect the repair didn’t feel
like dismantling all the cross arms and aerials, so they decided
to re-use the top part of the old mast. In order to do this they
fitted a short length of mast into the brackets and used a mast
coupler to slot the old mast into place. Not long afterwards the
wind blew and of course the new mast bent over, since the stress
was concentrated at the bottom of the mast coupler.